Charms and spoken formulas

A zamovlyannia is a spoken formula addressed to an illness, an animal, a natural force or a person, and used for healing, protection, love and various practical purposes. Folklorists have collected many thousands of them, and read as texts they are far more structured than the word charm suggests.

The standard structure

An opening that places the speaker: rising, washing, going out of the door, crossing a field. The journey is described in detail and it establishes a route from the everyday world to somewhere else.

Arrival at a fixed location: a sea, a stone in the middle of the sea, an oak, a mountain. These recur across regions and across centuries with remarkable stability.

An encounter with a figure who has the power in question.

The command itself, usually addressed to the affliction directly and ordering it out of the body and away to somewhere uninhabited.

And a sealing formula: a statement that the words are locked, the key thrown in the sea.

The imagery

The stone in the sea, the oak with roots and branches, the three brothers, the golden bridge. This is an inherited stock of images, and its stability across a very wide geography is one of the arguments for the age of the genre.

The transmission rules

A charm had to be given, not taken. It was passed to someone younger, at a particular life stage, and a charm told casually was held to lose its power — which is a very effective mechanism for preventing a body of specialist knowledge from becoming common property.

Why it is worth reading now

As poetry. The best of them are extraordinary compressed texts and they were composed by people who left no other written trace.

A text type with a stable structure and a fixed set of images is less literature than a template — and a template's value is that it can be transmitted. That, I think, is why it is worth reading now: it shows how a culture without writing kept a standard. The transmission rules themselves interested me more than the content.